Hijackers of Online Brokerage Account Are Arrested

A joint investigation team of police, including the Metropolitan Police Department, arrested two people with Chinese nationality with suspicion of violating Prohibition of Unauthorized Computer Access Act and Financial Instruments and Exchange Act in late November. Those suspects are doubted as having raised price of stock they held by hijacking someone’s online brokerage account.

There have been acknowledged by the police 9.3 thousands of cases, in which illegal trades were made, since January, 2025. It is estimated that 710 billion yen was exchanged with those illegal trades. It marked the first case of arresting hijackers in those cases this year, who have been degrading internet stock trade.

 

Those two Chinese are suspected that they, conspiring with someone, illegally accessed 10 accounts of 10 customers of security companies on March 17th, 2025. The suspects ordered a large volume of buying or selling shares of a certain company, which was listed on Standard Market of Tokyo Stock Exchange, and raised the price of stock by 30 percent, from 84 yen to 110 yen. They were successful in selling 700 thousand stocks in the raised price.

They made the orders using two accounts. One was the hijacked account and another was a corporate account owned by one of the two suspects. They bought a large amount of shares of a company, on which investors ordinary had no major trades, from those two accounts in the same time. Price of the stock immediately rose. Then, they sold the shares in the corporate account in the high price, and meanwhile bought those shares through the hijacked account. The profit in the corporate account amounted to 10 percent of the price at the time of buying.

 

It is unclear how they hijacked someone’s account. A typical method of illegal access is phishing scam, in which a criminal group leads the account holders to input their username and password into a false site pretending to be a stock company. Although the stock companies took countermeasures issuing one-time password in every trade, the criminal groups broke those measures by setting a false webpage to input username and password.

 

Those illegal trade has outstandingly been shown from the beginning of this year. The false trades hit a peak in April counting 293 billion yen in 2.9 thousand cases. Japan Securities Dealers Association announced in May that it would compensate a certain amount of damages of their customers in the phishing scams.

 

However, the illegal cases of trade have not been eliminated. It is suspected that some organizations of Chinese are involved in the illegal trades. It can not only be the illegal share trading, but cyberattack on stock trading system in Japan. Financial Services Agency and stock companies are enhancing countermeasures to illegal stock trades in terms of economic security.

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